Practical Founders Podcast

Shameem Hameed created several companies, including a medical billing services company, before starting ZH Healthcare in 2008 to provide billing and EHR software to innovative healthcare providers. Their BlueBriX software grew into a comprehensive and customizable platform used by hundreds of healthcare organizations around the world.

ZH Healthcare now has almost 200 employees in the US and India. The company has been profitable every year and has not taken on any outside funding.

Kevin McArdle spent 15 years working in large software companies before becoming a practical investor and acquirer of smaller SaaS businesses. Kevin is the CEO and co-founder of Big Band Software, a holding company that buys and holds small, profitable, and growing SaaS businesses—with no intent of selling those businesses. Kevin has acquired over 40 businesses in the last 10 years with this buy-and-hold model.

As an expert guest on the podcast, Kevin answers common questions from practical founders about the holding company approach as an exit path. Holding companies are common in other industries, including Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, but relatively new to the software industry.

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Harry Hopkins is co-founder and CIO of Viewgol, a medical billing technology software and services company based in Dallas, Texas. Viewgol was started in 2017 by three founders who got the product and revenues going before hiring additional staff. Their revenue cycle management (RCM) analytics software reveals medical billing problems and missed revenue opportunities at physician offices in the US.

As the company expanded its service offerings, Viewgol grew very quickly, from three employees in 2019 to almost a thousand employees at the end of 2023. Viewgol was acquired in October 2023 by CPSI, a public medical billing solutions company, for a reported $67 million in cash and earnouts.

Hamed Mazrouie owned a security monitoring business and other businesses for many years before he started his first software and services business called Vivant Corporation. Vivant provides a complete multi-site internet phone system to thousands of restaurants and law firms across the US. Vivant grew steadily and profitably for 10 years and is now a maturing business with 50 employees.

In the last four years, Hamed and his growing team have been building Milagro, a complete restaurant management system to increase repeat customer business. They now have happy paying customers who use their powerful software which includes advanced data analytics. Their vision is expanding based on early customer results.

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Subramanyam Kasibhat has created dozens of products in many different industries. He and his wife were contracted by a friend to build a software solution for a manufacturing plant for a German company. Seven years after they started with their first customer, they rewrote the software to serve other customers and the Vegam Solutions business started to grow.

Vegam Solutions is smart factory software for digital optimization and control of complex manufacturing plants. Vegam now has 180 remote employees, primarily in India, with almost $10 million in revenue. They have grown without outside funding by selling to large customers with complex needs.

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Jafar Owainati was a mechanical engineer before he got an MBA in entrepreneurship and decided to start a software company with two friends. They looked at many ideas before building software to help sales engineers respond to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) faster and easier. They launched Loopio in 2014 and had paying customers within one year.

The three founders built the software and sold the first customers before adding more employees as they approached $1M ARR. They kept growing faster with a disciplined and frugal approach to $3M ARR before raising a round of VC funding from OpenView Ventures, a practical investor that aligned with the vision and approach of Loopio's founders.

Loopio now has hundreds of employees and Sumeru Equity Partners made a strategic $200 million private equity investment in 2021. Jafar left to start a compensation management software company called Barley which is starting to grow quickly now.

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Miles Schwartz a cofounder of Zūm Rails, a fast-growing fintech based in Canada with a growing worldwide presence. In just 3.5 years and without any outside funding, Zūm Rails has grown from a focused startup to a credible open banking and instant payment gateway with $10M in ARR. Zum Rails also integrated KYC (Know Your Customer) technology which reduces fraud across all payment types.

Miles and his cofounder had experience with fintech payments before they started Zum Rails to improve EFT payment processing in Canada. As they worked with more partners and grew revenues, they expanded the Zum Rails solution and built relationships with larger partners.

Fast-growth, larger partner opportunities, and traction with a US expansion are causing Miles and his cofounders to think differently about the potential for the company and potentially raising growth capital from the right VC investment partner.

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Bernardo Carvalho Wertheim is a worldly entrepreneur who grew up in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and then moved to the UK to go to school and start his career in advertising. He kept traveling and eventually settled in Santiago, Chile, where he started a tech startup and participated in a tech accelerator.

The Bridge started as a community and jobs platform connecting UX designers in Latin America to work at startups and large agencies worldwide. They expanded the services offerings and eventually grew to $10 million in revenue by helping to employ hundreds of high-skilled remote creative professionals.

In 2023, the Bridge was acquired by Gi Group, a large Italian HR services conglomerate that wanted to expand its footprint in Latin America. Bernie stayed on to help The Bridge serve a global audience and work with other Gi Group organizations across Europe and Latin America.

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When Patrick Randolph discovered that doctors' offices lose 20% of appointments due to patient cancellations and no-shows, he set out to design and test a solution. QueueDr was created to fill those open slots with patients in the waitlist "queue."

With just a little funding and lots of hard work, they began by helping small practices and group practices fill open slots with no human intervention. Eventually, they sold to larger organizations and became profitable as they grew. QueueDR was acquired by Phreesia (PHR: NYSE) in March 2021 for an undisclosed amount.

Topics discussed on this podcast

• How he prototyped and designed the full product before writing any code
• The multiple challenges of selling technology to healthcare providers
• How they started by selling to small offices and eventually sold enterprise deals to large organizations
• Why he didn't want to raise another round of VC funding after raising $1 million from an investor
• How he developed the relationship with leaders at the company that eventually acquired QueueDr
• How he thinks about life after selling his company

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Raj Khera has had three exits as a software entrepreneur and leader in his long career. His first company, GovCon, grew in the late 1990s to help government contractors easily access new contracts up for bid by the US government. Their advertising and subscription revenues grew quickly, and he sold GovCon in 1999 for $12.5 million.

He bootstrapped one of the first email marketing software businesses in the early 2000s called MailerMailer to help small businesses send emails. Raj and his brother Vik ran this as a profitable small business for many years, giving them an interesting business challenge while not sacrificing time with their families. After running the business for 15 years, Raj sold MailerMailer to a public software company, J2 Global, in 2017.

Then Raj joined a struggling VC-funded software company called WealthEngine to help grow sales, create new products and exit. Wealth Engine was successfully sold in late 2020. Raj is now an active advisor to software founders. At MoreBusiness.com, he coaches software founders to efficiently acquire customers using advanced search engine optimization and marketing techniques.

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.